News & Updates

After the successful completion of the Vedānta BORI Project, we are launching a variety of new such initiatives. The first of these is the Early Science Manuscripts Project, led by Prof. Dominik Wujastyk and funded by the University of Alberta (as part of the "Cosmopolitanism and the Local in Science and Nature" project). The project sets out to document archival manuscript sources for the history of indigenous science in India and Nepal, beginning with the rich manuscript collections identified by the NGMPP. Already the team--Dominik and his student Madhusudan Rimal--have created or edited over 4500 entities, including over 2700 manuscripts.

We are delighted to share with you some very positive news: the work on the Vedānta BORI project has been successfully completed. This project, which began in November 2017, set out to enter into Pandit all the data found in the three volumes of BORI’s Descriptive Catalog of the Government Collection of Manuscripts, Vedānta Vol IX. The result of this meticulous work is 7,450 new (or newly edited) entities, including 1,220 manuscripts, over 4,800 manuscript extracts, 479 people, 790 works, and more than ten thousand relationships among them.

We have reached another important milestone in our work on BORI’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Government Collection of Manuscripts, Vedānta Vol IX, a project which began in November 2017. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of Jonathan Peterson, Sukshmadarshi Maharaj, and Anusha Sudindra Rao, the bulk of this project is now completed. In the course of digitizing the second volume, the team has created or edited about 444 manuscript entities, 259 works, 1838 extracts, and 133 people. We are already working on the third and last volume, and we hope to complete our work on it in the coming few months.

We are We are happy to announce some innovations regarding manuscripts.
For each manuscript, data can now be entered regarding the site in which it is located, and the institution in which it is stored, the collection of which it is part, in addition to its shelfmark. Moreover, the system now computes an identifier (a kind of short name) for every new manuscript entered (or when editing an existing manuscript entity) according to these values. Read more about how to enter manuscript data in our user guide.

We have reached an important milestone in our work on BORI’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Government Collection of Manuscripts, Vedānta Vol IX, a project which began in November 2017. The team working on this project, headed by Jonathan Peterson, has completed entering the first out of three printed volumes that make up BORI’s descriptive catalog: 377 manuscripts that belong to about 200 works have been entered, as well as 1515 extracts and various other related entities (authors, scribes, etc.). Overall, a third of the dataset has been successfully imported, and we hope to complete the work by the summer of 2019.

Pandit is happy to introduce a new set of fields that document textual reuse. From now on, data contributors are invited to connect one work to another by noting the type of reuse involved (verbatim citation, close version, or a loose paraphrase of the other work), the kind of acknowledgment offered (correct, false, or none), and the kind of affect involved (endorsement, criticism, or neither). For each work there can be more than one value (for instance, if work X both cites verbatim and paraphrases different passages of work Y), and each work can be connected to many works it reuses. Please try this when you add data!

We are happy to announce that as of today, data from Pandit can be downloaded using the CSV button at the bottom of type-specific search pages (Works, People, etc.) Our policy has always been that Pandit data are open, free, and meant to be shared. Now we have the first mechanism in place to allow you not only to input information into Pandit but also to retrieve it for your needs. Please try it at home!

Pandit was presented at the ‪Emory Digital Humanities Symposium: DH for the Study and Teaching of South Asia, Atlanta GA, April 6-7, 2018. It was an opportunity to introduce our system to an excellent crowd of DH experts and bibliographers.

In connection with our work on the BORI Vedānta import, we have now created a new entity type: Extract. This entity allows contributors to enter passages from the various manuscripts, typically from its beginning and end, such as namaskāra phrases, maṅgala verses, and so on.

We are excited to announce the beginning of a new initiative: importing the contents of BORI’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Government Collection of Manuscripts, Vedānta, Vol IX, Part I-III. The work will be done in collaboration with the Rise of Vedānta project headed by Prof. Ajay Rao and Lawrence McCrea, with a team of graduate students from Toronto and Jerusalem headed by Jonathan Peterson. In the coming months, we expect to import information concerning a thousand of manuscripts and their related data, such as works, authors, and extracts.

After meticulously going through the Person and Work entities, we are happy to announce that we cleaned Pandit of most duplications resulting from the Karl Potter Bibliographies import. The hard work led by Omer Kessler is fully documented in the duplicates spreadsheet. Thank you Omer! There is, of course, always the chance that we overlooked something or were unable to resolve whether similarly-looking entities are, indeed, duplicates, so please keep an open eye for suspect redundancies. Contributors: please make sure to double check whether an entity you are about to enter does not already exist on Pandit. We do not want to introduce new duplications.

Yigal Bronner talked about Pandit in The Future of Digital Texts in South Asian Studies / A SARIT Workshop, Vienna, May 22–24.2017. The talk included a hands-on presentation of the database and a discussion of future possibilities and challenges.

Pandit is launching its accreditation system: every contributor is now credited for each contribution, whether editing an existing entity or adding a new one. Another new feature: the system now automatically produces a suggested citation for every entity, taking into account the different input of every contributor. An algorithm computes the relative weight of every contribution and lists the contributors in the citation accordingly.

A new feature allows Pandit contributors to follow updates on topics or areas of their choice. You can now follow the contribution of a fellow contributor, any additions or new data on genres, disciplines, and languages that interest you, or new revisions to specific entities, such as a certain person or work. To try this, just click the blue "Follow" button on the relevant page.

Pandit completed a major import from Karl Potter’s massive Bibliography of Indian Philosophies - a rich, highly reliable, and, until recently, constantly updated list of works, persons, and related secondary sources in the different philosophical traditions of South Asia. We have created a total of 46,192 entities out of Karl Potter's database (35,077 print sources, 8,179 works, and 2,936 persons).

We now begin the process of scrutinizing Pandit for suspect duplications that may have resulted from this import.

Pandit completed its first significant import by incorporating all the data collected and curated by members of the Sanskrit Knowledge on the Eve of Colonialism project, headed by Prof. Sheldon Pollock. We imported a total of 4,548 entities out of SKSEC: 2,127 manuscripts, 1,316 works, 985 persons, 69 sites, 45 print sources, and 6 institutions.